Four is Greater than Forty

Erin Bean — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 10:55:00 -0800

Trey and I would like to track our car usage here in the blog’s sidebar for you, but we’re having a hard time figuring out how to report the information. It’s not as easy as you might think. For example, we drove our car about four miles in the last week (Trey sent me on a late-night mercy mission for decongestant). If you tally that four miles against the 100+ miles most people drive in a week, it sounds pretty good. But four miles is nuthin’ on bike, and I could’ve biked for the decongestant very easily. By hopping in the car, I succumbed to the allure of convenience.

Now let’s say Trey and I drove 40 miles round trip to go visit my grandmother. It’d be ten times as many miles on the odometer, but I think those 40 miles are more justified than the four I drove this week. Using other modes of transportation to get to my grandma’s house would take a very long time: a bus, then a train, then riding our bikes from the train station to grandmother’s house. It’d probably take an hour and a half, one way, making a visit to my grandma a big luxury. That’s when driving a car makes sense, to me.

How do we depict that in a sidebar? I don’t know. We’ll sit on it. If you have any ideas, let us know.

Don't Drive: Four is Greater than Forty

Four is Greater than Forty